The WOW Science Thread

[sandman67]

And now for a fine outstanding example of why the fight for science is important.

The US seems particularly infected with a peculiar type of paranoid delusional cynisim when it comes to science...odd you might think for the nation that gave us NASA and the moon landings. But then again 20% or so of the US population thinks that NASA faked the whole shebang.

Anyway....here is a good example of why such stupidity continues, and pig ignorance is elevated into sage advice. Anne Coulter, always a proudly ignorant know nothing and general lipstick smeared meat sack viper, has this little bit of wisdom/misinformed claptrap syndicated across a hundred or so papers in the US:

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=45747

Note that every single argument she presents has been comprehensively shredded by the scientific and academic community over and over and over again.

One small example on one day......multiply her stupidity a hundredfold and you get Fox News...a so called news channel that has her on regularly spouting her bile, venom and idiocy. The home of climate change deniars, birthers, truthers, Birchers, and Bill O'Reilly...the man who doesnt know how our Moon got where it is, and thinks that oceanic tides are a proof that God exists.

And that, my pedigree chums, is why two thirds of Americans think "God Did It" is the correct answer to questions on a biology test, and scientists are all some sort of Dr Evil characters in a global cabal.

[sandman67]

Welcome to the planet Bling

(Reuters) - Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.

The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.

"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

Lying 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.

Pulsars are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of radiation.

In the case of pulsar J1719-1438, the beams regularly sweep the Earth and have been monitored by telescopes in Australia, Britain and Hawaii, allowing astronomers to detect modulations due to the gravitational pull of its unseen companion planet.

The measurements suggest the planet, which orbits its star every two hours and 10 minutes, has slightly more mass than Jupiter but is 20 times as dense, Bailes and colleagues reported in the journal Science on Thursday.

In addition to carbon, the new planet is also likely to contain oxygen, which may be more prevalent at the surface and is probably increasingly rare toward the carbon-rich center.

Its high density suggests the lighter elements of hydrogen and helium, which are the main constituents of gas giants like Jupiter, are not present.

Just what this weird diamond world is actually like close up, however, is a mystery.

"In terms of what it would look like, I don't know I could even speculate," said Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester. "I don't imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we're looking at here."

unconfirmed reports around notorious golddigger Kim Kardashian and her chavvy siblings funding a space rocket to go there remain at this time pure speculation

[sandman67]

and now back down to earth...if you will forgive the pun. An aricle on the 1300s Black Death outbrreak from the Guardian

Rats weren't the carriers of the plague after all. A study by an archaeologist looking at the ravages of the Black Death in London, in late 1348 and 1349, has exonerated the most famous animal villains in history.

"The evidence just isn't there to support it," said Barney Sloane, author of The Black Death in London. "We ought to be finding great heaps of dead rats in all the waterfront sites but they just aren't there. And all the evidence I've looked at suggests the plague spread too fast for the traditional explanation of transmission by rats and fleas. It has to be person to person – there just isn't time for the rats to be spreading it."

He added: "It was certainly the Black Death but it is by no means certain what that disease was, whether in fact it was bubonic plague."

Sloane, who was previously a field archaeologist with the Museum of London, working on many medieval sites, is now attached to English Heritage. He has concluded that the spread of the 1348-49 plague, the worst to hit the capital, was far faster, with an impact far worse than had been estimated previously.

While some suggest that half the city's population of 60,000 died, he believes it could have been as high as two-thirds. Years later, in 1357, merchants were trying to get their tax bill cut on the grounds that a third of all property in the city was lying empty.

Sloane spent nearly 10 years researching his book, poring over records and excavation reports. Many records have gone missing, while there was also a documentation shortfall as disaster overwhelmed the city. Names of those buried in three emergency cemeteries seem not to have been recorded.

However, Sloane found a valuable resource in records from the Court of Hustings, of wills made and then enacted during the plague years. As the disease gripped – in October 1348 rather than the late summer others suggested, reaching its height in April 1349 – the numbers of wills soared as panic-striken wealthy citizens realised their deaths were probably imminent.

On 5 February 1349 Johanna Ely, her husband already dead, arranged provision for her children, Richard and Johanna. She left them property, spelled out which beds and even pots and pans each was to receive, and placed them in the guardianship of her own mother. She was dead within 72 hours.

It appeared to the citizens that everyone in the world might die. Richard de Shordych left goods and money to his son Benedict when he died in early March: his son outlived him by a fortnight.

Money, youth, and formerly robust good health were no protection. Edward III's own daughter, Joan, sailed for Spain with her trousseau, her dowry and her bridesmaids, to marry Pedro, heir to the throne of Castile. She would never see her wedding day as she died of the plague within 10 days of landing.

John of Reading, a monk in Westminster, left one of the few witness accounts. He described deaths happening so fast there was "death without sorrow, marriage without affection, self-imposed penance, want without poverty, and flight without escape".

In Rochester, William of Dene wrote that nobody could be found to bury the dead, "but men and women carried the bodies of their own little ones to church on their shoulders and threw them into mass graves from which arose such a stink that it was barely possible for anyone to go past a churchyard".

Sloane estimates that people living near the cemetery at Aldersgate, which is now buried under Charterhouse Square, in Smithfield, would have seen a corpse carried past every five minutes at the height of the plague.

As many wills were being made in a week as in a normal year. Usually these would only be activated months or years later: in the worst weeks of the plague there was barely time to get them written down. Many, like Johanna Ely, probably made their wills when they felt the first dreaded sweats and cramps of the disease. Others left property and the care of their children to people who then barely outlived them.

The archaeology of the plague also reveals that most people, however, were buried with touching care, neatly laid out in rows, heads facing west, with far more bodies put in coffins than in most medieval cemeteries – but possibly through fear of infection.

Only a few jumbled skeletons hint at burials carried out some time after death and decomposition; those cases probably arose because bodies were found later on in buildings where every member of the household had died.

Sloane believes there was little difference in mortality rates between rich and poor, because they lived so closely packed together. The plague, he is convinced, spread from person to person in the crowded city.

Mortality continued to rise throughout the bitterly cold winter, when fleas could not have survived, and there is no evidence of enough rats.

Black rat skeletons have been found at 14th-century sites, but not in high enough numbers to make them the plague carriers, he said.

In sites beside the Thames, where most of the city's rubbish was dumped and rats should have swarmed, and where the sodden ground preserves organic remains excellently, few black rats have been found.

Sloane wants to dig up Charterhouse, where he believes 20,000 bodies lie under the ancient alms houses and modern buildings, including the Art Deco block where the fictional character Hercule Poirot lives in the television series. And, if anyone finds a mass medieval rat grave, he would very much like to know.

One possible explaination is that rat catching was a paid profession with the catchers paid by the local borough authorities and bughers by the rat in those days, or by merchants guilds like the guild of millers or guild of cloth merchants. So an enterprising catcher would sweep up the dead rats and turn em in for cash. The rats corpses were dumped into the river Thames or burned according to the Tony Robertson doc on nasty mediaeval jobs I saw...hence no rat mounds.

Interestingly there are still bits of London where you cant build as they are old plague pits from the black death and cholera outbreaks. One is at Blackheath, another next door to the OFT building on Breams Buildings in the City. Under Blackheath Common lie hundreds of thousands of black death victims from the 1300s and 1600s outbreaks.

A mate of mine who was a navvy, Big Tony, once accidentally drilled through into a sepulchure in the City area of London that contained victims of one of the cholera outbreaks. The cieling of the sepulchure collapsed and he and his mates fell in. They all thought it a big adventure till the DoH guys turned up and quarantined em. He and the other men on the crew were shut up in Homerton Hospital's isolation rooms for three days on quarantine while checks were made....so its still considered a threat even now.

[sandman67]

Ok folks....strap yourself in and don the tinfoil helmets....

A few Catholics still insist Galileo was wrong
They say Earth is the center of the universe, embracing church teachings of four centuries ago.

A few Catholics still insist Galileo was wrong
By Manya A. Brachear, Chicago Tribune

10:45 p.m. CDT, August 27, 2011
Reporting from Chicago—
Some people believe the world revolves around them — and their belief is born not of selfishness but of faith.

A few conservative Roman Catholics are pointing to a dozen Bible verses and the church's original teachings as proof that Earth is the center of the universe, the view that was at the heart of the church's clash with Galileo Galilei four centuries ago.

The relatively obscure movement has gained a following among those who find comfort in knowing there are still staunch defenders of early church doctrine.

"This subject is, as far as I can see, an embarrassment to the modern church because the world more or less looks upon geocentrism, or someone who believes it, in the same boat as the flat Earth," said James Phillips ofCicero, Ill.

Phillips attends Our Lady Immaculate Catholic Church in Oak Park, Ill., a parish run by the Society of St. Pius X, which rejects most of the modernizing reforms made by the Vatican II council from 1962 to 1965.

But by challenging modern science, proponents of a geocentric universe are challenging the very church they seek to serve and protect.

"I have no idea who these people are," said Brother Guy Consolmagno, curator of meteorites and spokesman for the Vatican Observatory. "Are they sincere, or is this a clever bit of theater?"

Those promoting geocentrism argue that heliocentrism, or the centuries-old consensus among scientists that Earth revolves around the sun, is a conspiracy to squelch the church's influence.

"Heliocentrism becomes dangerous if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system," said Robert Sungenis, leader of a budding movement to get scientists to reconsider. "False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions — thus the state of the world today.… Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world, and governments and academia were subservient to her."

Sungenis is no Don Quixote. Hundreds of curiosity seekers, skeptics and supporters attended a conference last fall titled "Galileo Was Wrong. The Church Was Right" near the University of Notre Dame campus inSouth Bend, Ind.

Astrophysicists at Notre Dame didn't appreciate the group hitching its wagon to America's flagship Catholic university and resurrecting a concept that's extinct for a reason.

"It's an idea whose time has come and gone," astrophysics professor Peter Garnavich said. "There are some people who want to move the world back to the 1950s when it seemed like a better time. These are people who want to move the world back to the 1250s."

Garnavich said the theory of geocentrism violates what he believes should be a strict separation of church and science. One answers why, the other answers how, and never the twain should meet, he said.

But supporters contend there is scientific evidence to support geocentrism, just as there is evidence to support the six-day story of creation in Genesis.

There is proof in Scripture that Earth is the center of the universe, Sungenis said. Among many verses, he cites Joshua 10:12-14 as definitive proof: "And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, while the nation took vengeance on its foe.… The sun halted in the middle of the sky; not for a whole day did it resume its swift course."

But Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., said the Bible is silent on geocentrism.

"There's a big difference between looking at the origin of the planets, the solar system and the universe and looking at presently how they move and how they are interrelated," Ham said. "The Bible is neither geocentric or heliocentric. It does not give any specific information about the structure of the solar system."

Just as Ham challenges the foundation of natural history museums by disputing evolution, Sungenis challenges planetariums, most notably the Vatican Observatory.

But Consolmagno said the very premise of going after Galileo illustrates the theory's lack of scientific credibility.

"Of course, we understand the universe in a far more nuanced way than Galileo did 400 years ago," he said.

"And I would hope that the next 400 years would see just as much development."

mbrachear@tribune.com

mwahhhh ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

[sandman67]

A couple of quick links to articles of interest .... Im posting these here rather than in Current Affairs "Climategate" threads as I cant be arsed with the Black Knights and their "Tis But A Scratch" nonsense any more. If you do contrbute to those pointless excersises in gobshite tennis feel free to slap the Black Knights about with these:

First up the shabby tactics clmate skeptic so called scientists employ to get their nonsense publshed, and the fallout the ensuing backlash and scandal causes:

Journal editor resigns over 'problematic' climate paper

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14768574

The interestng bit is down at the bottom:

Dr Spencer is one of the team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville that keeps a record of the Earth's temperature as determined from satellite readings.

He is also on the board of directors of the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing thinktank critical of mainstream climate science, and an advisor to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an evangelical Christian organisation that claims policies to curb climate change "would destroy jobs and impose trillions of dollars in costs" and "could be implemented only by enormous and dangerous expansion of government control over private life".

Religion, as ever, poisons everthing as the great Hitch so rightly stated.

NEXT....how these shabby excuses and the polticians who support them and their anti-science manage to persuade the public their myths are fact....using Goebells old trick of keep it short and say it often....

Myth-Making: Say It Often, People Will Believe

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/myth-m ... d=14414910

We are approaching the Age of Idiocracy.

Drink BRAWNDO....its got electrolytes!

[sandman67]

Ok, here is where I tear a rip and make myself even more unpopular with some of the flag wrapped US posters here....but frankly as a guy stuck in with TV as my main option for enetertainment, and a gag reaction at the three "knowlegde channels" 9/11 fever....9/11, 9/11 blah fircikn blah blah blah....here s my cry for sanity.

How about, instead of the bleating cack about terror (conveniently ignoring that pesky domestic terrorism issue lke Olklahoma or Dr George Tiller) and cryng our flag wrapped 9/11 mea culpas we remember 2011 for a US achievement?

2011 marks the 40th anniversary of Apollo 14 - the moon mission that provided kids like me, at the time back in 1971, with the first long continuous colour tv feed of men on the moon. Im too young to remember Armstrong, but I do remember standing in the back yard with my dad after the 1971 news, lookng up, and him telling me to wave to the men on the moon.

As Vick Stenger said.... "Science flew men to the moon. Religion flew men into buildngs."

So....lets take our hats off to the brave men of Apollo 14

To astronauts Roosa, Shepard, and Mitchell thanks from this little nipper for showing me that man is capable of incredible feats of bravery and exploration

FOR THE BETTER OF ALL

[STEVE G]

2011 marks the 40th anniversary of Apollo 14

Here is a rather nice picture of the Apollo 14 lunar module on the moon, it's a digital panorama that's been made by matching and joining the original pictures together.
http://moonpans.com/prints/40_A14lem.htm
I too watched all the moon missions with fascination as a child and I still remember being woken up in the early hours of the morning to see that very grainy image of Neil Armstrong descending the ladder to the surface.
I'm still fascinated by the Apollo missions today and I have downloads of all the radio transcripts and even a digital copy of a Saturn V flight manual.

[STEVE G]

Probe pictures Moon landing sites
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14813043

[sandman67]

The moon landing Mythbusters special was an eye opener as well in relation to the later Moon missions, as that program, as proof of the moon landngs, detailed how they left behind a series of special prismatic mirrors that NASA bounce lasers off to measure the Moons distance and orbital patterns....so maybe that "science package" in the image is that mirror array?

I love the "parked moon rover".....

[STEVE G]

This site gives some details of the Apollo laser reflectors which are still used today:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/m ... -LRRR.html

[sandman67]

Steve

as a fellow NASA fan I spend hours playng with Google Earths add ons Google Moon and Google Mars....well worth checkng out mate.

[SaSamSa]

I find magnets to be truly awesome... if you are into them, check out the blog on JK Magnetics' website.

There is an article on diamagnetism - here's an excerpt:

What is diamagnetism? What is pyrolytic graphite? Can magnets be levitated with it? How does a magnetic levitator work?

What is pyrolytic graphite?

Pyrolytic graphite is a strong diamagnetic material. It is a man-made form of graphite, which has some very interesting properties. In addition to being diamagnetic, it also tends to transport heat well across the plane of a sheet, but poorly through the thickness.

What is diamagnetism? Let's define the term, along with a few others below. Where the definitions say, "...an externally applied magnetic field," think: when a magnet is next to it.

Diamagnetic - A material that creates a magnetic field in opposition to an externally applied magnetic field. This weak opposing field produces a repelling force. Examples include pyrolytic carbon, superconductors and bismuth. Even water is diamagnetic, but only slightly.
Paramagnetic - A material that creates a magnetic field in the same direction as an externally applied magnetic field, but doesn't retain any magnetization after that field is removed. Examples include ferrofluid, which is often classified as a superparamagnet.
Ferromagnetic - A material that creates a strong magnetic field in the same direction as an externally applied magnetic field, and can retain some magnetization after the field is removed. Stuff that magnets stick to. Examples include iron, nickel, cobalt and refrigerator doors.
A diamagnetic material is one that will repel a magnet. Even with the strongest diamagnetic materials, though, the force is very small.

Recently, in an effort to highlight these small but interesting forces, some scientists used an incredibly strong magnetic field (16 Tesla, or 160,000 Gauss) to levitate a frog. The magnetic field is well over 20 times what you can measure around a strong neodymium magnet. The frog is made up of mostly water, which is mildly diamagnetic. The water is repelled by the magnet and makes the frog levitate, which makes for a very cool video.

[STEVE G]

The water is repelled by the magnet and makes the frog levitate, which makes for a very cool video.

That is pretty amazing:

[hhfarang]

NASA’s Cassini orbiter snaps unbelievable picture of Saturn



Full story:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology- ... 33480.html

[hhfarang]

Probe pictures Moon landing sites

Yeah, they got some amazing photos, especially the closeups... uh oh... what's this!?!